The aim of this panel is to explore the potential of project-based teaching and learning as a way of increasing students’ proficiency and sensitivity to language and culture. More specifically, it proposes to reflect on the ways in which individual and group projects (such as research projects, translations, interviews, events programming, etc.) can help students obtain a better understanding of French language and society by developing their translingual and transcultural skills.

How does poetry model, resist and press against the material transformation of cities and urban regions? How do poems engage with urban change as it shapes the movement of people, commodities, and ideas, and as it curates affective experience and interior lives?

At a time when urban areas house the majority of the global population, and in which their continued uneven (re)development and decay perpetuates the stratification of access to material, social and economic resources, we are interested in how poetry across historical periods and geographies responds to, synthesizes, and participates in the transformation of the urban built environment.

If literary scholars have traditionally wielded theory, not least the legacies of ideology critique, to relate cultural production to transformations in the capitalist lifeworld, historians have long avoided political economy as a core analytic in favor of concepts like “markets” and “societies.” Since the 2008 financial crisis, historians have drawn on previous work in the areas of social, economic, business, legal, and labor history, to develop a new subfield, “history of capitalism.”

In the preface to Louis Lémery’s translation of his 1702 Traité des aliments, he argues that “the Ground-work of our Preservation, consists chiefly in a Knowledge of suiting Foods to every Constitution, as it best agrees with; and so the Knowledge we ought to be most desirous of, should be that of Foods” (ix-x). Diet and survival were salient concerns throughout the eighteenth century, and, in turn, literature is bursting with references to the production and consumption of food. However, foodstuffs in relation to health is still a relatively overlooked topic in long eighteenth-century scholarship (approximately 1660-1832).

This panel welcomes papers that explore, but are by no means limited to:

Instructing English language learners (ELLs) in composition is a topic that has been widely debated in recent years. Finding ways for teaching ELL students is almost marginalized, though the number of ELL students is growing too fast in the USA institutions. Some scholars and texts suggest emphasis on certain concepts, such as grammar, to better teach writing to ELLs. All studies proved that grammar is not the only factor that can improve the ELL’s writing because there is still disempowerment in ELL writing. This disempowerment comes from treating language as the only barrier to ELL students, when in fact genre serves as an equally challenging barrier, if not more so.

CALL FOR PAPERS – Indigenous Writing and Culture of North America – Canada and the United States

The Literary Encyclopedia at www.litencyc.com is looking for qualified writers to enhance its coverage of Indigenous writing and culture of the United States and Canada. The list below is not comprehensive or final, and new proposals of writers/ works/context essays that are not currently listed in our database are also welcome. However, we will prioritize articles on writers and works frequently studied in university courses, and those that are highly topical and well-known.

Now in its eleventh year, the AUM Southern Studies Conference, hosted by Auburn University at Montgomery, explores themes related to the American South across a wide array of disciplines and methodologies. Registrants to the two-day interdisciplianry conference enjoy a variety of peer-reviewed panels, two distinguished keynote speakers and a visiting artist, who gives a talk and mounts a gallery exhibition.

To broaden the conversation surrounding subjectivity, imperialism, gender and travel, this panel aims to advance the study of travel writing by considering performance as a category of significance to the understanding of the social production of travel narratives. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst, in their introduction to New Directions in Travel Writing Studies (2015), establish a connection between performance and travel, claiming that performativity is a driving force behind the development of travel writing as a genre.

I am pleased to announce a forthcoming special issue of the journal Humanities focused on “Romanticism and Contemporary Literary Theory.” As Brian McGrath has noted, new literary theoretical ideas are often articulated for the first time in relation to Romantic-period texts. This may be because Romantic-period authors, like literary theorists today, returned repeatedly to fundamental questions about relationships between expression and self-becoming, the environment and human flourishing, progress and the persistence of the past. It may be because so many of the ideas about education, perception, and community that still influence us found their first expression in English between the 1780s and 1830s.